Friday Five: Living in the Future Edition

Drawing in 3D, visualising Londons commuters and Google-generated poetry: yep, this is the 21st Century.

With half our office out at PHP London this Friday, it’s quiet
in JAX towers… too quiet. Thankfully the Friday Five should bring
such much-needed raucousness back into our working day, with an
unintended “living in a high-tech future” theme.

1. High Profile Hacks – Burger King tweet a
whopper

Global hacking collective Anonymous have been at it again this
week, with fast food chain Burger King
their latest target. The US company’s Twitter account was the
subject of a security breach on Monday, with a tweet claiming
they’d been bought out by rival McDonalds. Not long after, their
profile picture was changed to the eponymous golden arches. Twitter
acted swiftly suspending the account, but the damage had already
been done with nearly half a million tweets related to the
incident. Although Burger King gained a whopping 30,000 followers
in one day because of the hack.

It’s been a week of high profile hacking – the next day, Chrysler
Jeep’s account started posting disparaging tweets about the
off-road vehicle, while American billionaire Donald Trump’s account
posted a Lil Wayne lyric, peeving the tycoon immensely.

Despite its insane growth, Kickstarter has struggled to shake off a
reputation for being a catalogue of vapourware. However,
3Doodler looks very real, despite its outlandish concept: It
can “draw” solid plastic lines seemingly out of thin air.

3Doodler

The project originally planned to raise just $30,000, but with 30
days to go has already raised a jaw-dropping $1.5m.

3. A day on London’s transport network

breakerbreaker

The JAX editorial team has spent enough time on the Underground to
know there’s a lot of people on it. But we never knew just how busy
it can get from day to day. Jay Gordon has published this cool
visualisation of the 16 million daily transactions on London’s
transport networks, using vehicle data from buses and Oyster
cards.

Each pixel represents a 100m section of Greater London. Green
indicates the number of passengers in transit, blue shows
travellers either before their trip or after, while red indicates
those are between trips or outside the network. The result is
something rather beautiful and shows just how hectic London’s
transport network can get.

4. The next generation of shooting stuff

Did you catch Sony’s big PlayStation
4 press conference this week? While still light on details,
Sony at least showed off its new touchpad controller, revealed that
it can livestream and record videos of your gameplay and promised
the final console would be out by the year’s end.

Matt Lees of VideoGamer.com has packaged up the event’s highlights
in a three-minute video (warning: contains NSFW language and
British humour).

PlayStation 4

5. Google gets poetic

And finally… Who would have thought that the world’s most popular
search engine could provide so many eloquent stanzas just with its
autocomplete function? New Tumblr blog Google Poetics is the poetry
compendium on the subjects that the people want. It could be up
there with Keats and Wordsworth.